According to Wired News, we’re less productive using tech:
“We think we’re faster, smarter, better with all this technology at our side and in the end, we still feel rushed and our feeling of productivity is down,” said Maria Woytek, marketing communications manager for Day-Timers, a unit of ACCO Brands.

Only 51% of Workers now still claim that they feel very productive – 1994 that was up at 83%.

I haven’t been working in 1994, on the contrary, I was a student and just getting used to computers. But what they say in that article sounds realistic…

As I just found out, the Ricky Gervais show on podcast now charges money for their podcast. Up to $1.95 per episode. That will be a nice little revenue stream for them, as some of the episodes have been downloaded more than 250.000 times (even though this number is now most likely to decrease a lot).

I don’t think I will pay in order to continue to listen. There are so many other podcasts – may be not as good, but at least for free. We’ll see.

This will be the start of a whole new debate: how much can you charge for a podcast? How much for a show done by professionals, but sounding rather improvised – like amateurs podcasts (which is how I perceive the Ricky Gervais podcasts)?

And, from a users perspective: how good does a podcast have to be, in order for you to willingly dish out $2 per 30 minutes?

I have no answers, as I only now thought about these questions myself… May be later.

As Werbeblogger writes, these are the Marketing Director, Marketing Manager, two Senior Brand Managern and the Sponsorchip Manager.

But do make sure you pretend you’re from somewhere in the UK. Here is why:

Next, lots of people from countries outside of the UK are asking why they canâ€™t access the blog. There are two answers to this. Obviously Guinness is one great brand that’s widely loved in about 150 countries. But the drinkers in those countries are all different so what the various marketing teams get up to differs also. What’s on this blog is specifically about our GB plans – hence the focus on those drinkers. There are legal issues with us making content the GB team have written available to other countries.

If you claim you’re from “other”, you’re being sent straight on to Yahoo! (which isn’t all that bad either).

What I find particularly interesting: the marketing people are blogging about their jobs, even posting agency storyboards of TV spots.

At the moment, Online Advertising is projected to grow at 19%, but search engine advertising is supposed to grow at 26% according to the same source.

This shows, how important search advertising is growing to be. It is important enough, obviously, for some companies to seriously think about how to incentivise the user for using their search engines. MSN even put up a microsite with a sweepstake for using their search, called search and win.
Or even pay Dell $10 for every computer shipped that has their desktop search function pre-installed, as this German website says.

The search war ain’t over yet. Expect more, evermore interesting battles, of which, hopefully, mainly the user will benefit.